After months of buzz and a very noisy snub at The Game Awards, ARC Raiders has finally secured the coveted Game of the Year nomination, this time from the British Academy. The celebration will be short-lived lived though, because Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding 2 and the RPG heavyweight Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 have stormed the BAFTA Games Awards with a tidal wave of nominations.

As the year draws to a close, the games industry slips into awards mode and looks back at what the last twelve months have delivered. In 2025, we have seen a pivotal mix of bold new IP and long-awaited releases, from boundary-pushing experiments like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 to long-delayed projects such as Hollow Knight: Silksong, which many players did not expect to touch before the end of the decade.

Against this backdrop, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts has revealed the nominees for the 2026 BAFTA Games Awards. In the all-important Best Game category, ARC Raiders has finally achieved the Game of the Year nomination its fans have been clamoring for, but it faces two towering rivals. Kojima Productions has earned ten nominations for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, while the French RPG Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 leads the entire field with an impressive seventeen nods.

Although BAFTA is best known for its film and television trophies, the organization has been honoring video games for around twenty years, and today it hands out awards in up to seventeen categories, more than many specialist game shows. It is one of the industry’s longest-running institutions and has gradually refined its categories, including splitting performance into separate lead and supporting awards, something The Game Awards has also adopted in recent years.

With that context, the slate for the April 2026 ceremony is one of the strongest lineups in recent memory. Two names dominate the conversation. On one side is Hideo Kojima, whose latest work, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, has collected ten nominations. On the other hand is Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the French RPG that tops the chart with seventeen nominations and enters the night as a clear favorite. Even so, there is room for surprises, and one of them is undeniably ARC Raiders.

The extraction shooter from Embark Studios has become one of the most talked-about releases of the last couple of months. Many players fully expected it to be in the running for Game of the Year. Its absence from The Game Awards, especially from the GOTY shortlist, sparked outrage, with high-profile streamers like Shroud and his eleven million Twitch followers calling for a boycott and accusing Geoff Keighley’s show of being “rigged” for leaving the game out of both the main award and the Players’ Choice category. The BAFTAs, by contrast, have embraced ARC Raiders in several major fields, including Best Game.

Below are the nominees in the key categories. Those who want to dive into the full list of all seventeen awards can head to the official BAFTA 2026 website.

Best Game
• ARC Raiders
• Blue Prince
• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
• Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
• Dispatch
• Ghost of Yotei
• Hades II
• Hollow Knight: Silksong
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
• Split Fiction

Best Debut
• Blue Prince
• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
• Consume Me
• Date Everything!
• Chaos
• Dispatch
• Is This Seat Taken?
• The Midnight Walk
• The Rogue Prince of Persia
• Tiny Bookshop
• Better Design
• BALL x PIT
• Blue Prince
• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
• Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
• Donkey Kong Bananza
• Ghost of Yotei
• Hades II
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
• Split Fiction
• The Alters

Best Multiplayer
• ARC Raiders
• Battlefield 6
• Borderlands 4
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 7
• Dune Awakening
• Elden Ring Nightreign
• LEGO Party
• Mario Kart World
• PEAK
• Split Fiction

Best Music
• ARC Raiders
• Blue Prince
• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
• Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
• Dispatch
• DOOM: The Dark Ages
• Ghost of Yotei
• Hades II
• Hollow Knight: Silksong
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
• Better Storytelling
• Blue Prince
• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
• Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
• Dispatch
• Ghost of Yotei
• Hades II
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
• Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2
• Split Fiction
• The Alters

Best Performance
• Aaron Paul (Dispatch)
• Alex Jordan (The Alters)
• Ben Starr (Clair Obscur)
• Erika Ishii (Ghost of Yotei)
• Jennifer English (Clair Obscur)
• Judy Alice Lee (Hades II)
• Kaja Chan (Split Fiction)
• Laura Bailey (Dispatch)
• Suzie Yeung (Silent Hill f)
• Tom McKay (Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2)
• Troy Baker (Indiana Jones and the Great Circle)

Best Technical Achievement
• ARC Raiders
• Battlefield 6
• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
• Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
• Donkey Kong Bananza
• DOOM: The Dark Ages
• Ghost of Yotei
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
• Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2
• Split Fiction

With anticipation steadily building, Kojima’s latest odyssey and the nomination leading Expedition 33 look like the heavyweights to beat at the 2026 BAFTA Games Awards. Even so, the depth of the field means an upset is always possible. We will not know how the cards fall until April 2026, on a date BAFTA has yet to confirm.

Source: 3djuegos